Nansemond tribe gets back 500 acres of tribal land

History was marked in a quiet ceremony at the Tribal Center overlooking the Nansemond River on a glorious fall day. It was emotional for the Tribe and donors.

"What an amazing day for the Nansemond Tribe," Dominion Energy Tribal Relations Manager Ken Custalow said as he choked up. Custalow is a member of the Chickahominy Indians Eastern Division Tribe and affiliated with the Mattaponi Tribe. "Congratulations on the return of part of your homelands. This is a great day for you as well as Virginia and the national Native community and for me personally." Continued here: Nansemond get back tribal land

Ancient nuclear genomes enable repatriation of Indigenous human remains

http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/4/12/eaau5064

Abstract

After European colonization, the ancestral remains of Indigenous people were often collected for scientific research or display in museum collections. For many decades, Indigenous people, including Native Americans and Aboriginal Australians, have fought for their return. However, many of these remains have no recorded provenance, making their repatriation very difficult or impossible. To determine whether DNA-based methods could resolve this important problem, we sequenced 10 nuclear genomes and 27 mitogenomes from ancient pre-European Aboriginal Australians (up to 1540 years before the present) of known provenance and compared them to 100 high-coverage contemporary Aboriginal Australian genomes, also of known provenance.

We report substantial ancient population structure showing strong genetic affinities between ancient and contemporary Aboriginal Australian individuals from the same geographic location. Our findings demonstrate the feasibility of successfully identifying the origins of unprovenanced ancestral remains using genomic methods.

Article continues http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/4/12/eaau5064